Crossposted from Dogstar.org - Nonprofits and Web 2.0
Project Management tools are often on my mind. I've used many different tools in development of Web systems from Bugzilla (don't use it for project management, great bug tracker, terrible planning tool), to Drupal Case Tracker, to Rally, to Unfuddle, to JIRA, to MS Project, PHProjekt. Some are open sourced and others are proprietary. They all have the same goal though - to allow you to manage and track projects from conception to deployment.
While some tools have been better than others and yet other tools have been more like trying to drive a square peg through a round hole. For example, using Bugzilla to try and manage a project start to finish proved challenging. PHProjekt lacked the feature set that was needed to effectively manage. Drupal Case Tracker was OK, but had its quirks. JIRA is really cool, but the tools that make it especially attractive are licensed.
I've been told that dotproject has a robust feature set and also includes tools that rival MS Project. So, in this blog post I'm going to run through my experiences setting dotproject up locally. Future posts will discuss the pros and cons of the package. I am a Mac user, so I'm focusing this tutorial in that direction, but the directions should work whether you use MAMP, LAMP, XAMP, or WAMP. If you are wondering what the heck these are, check out the Wikipedia Entry
Here we go...
- So the first thing you need to do is download the software package here: Download here.
- Fire up MAMP and click on "Open Start Page"
- Click on phpMyAdmin in the menu bar at the top of the page
- Click on the "databases" link in the main body of the page
- At the bottom of this page is a text box that reads "create new database", type in a name for your new database and choose a "collation", I used UTF8
- Create a user for the database--click on the sql tab up top and use the following command "grant all on database_name.* to user_name@localhost identified by 'password';" with no quotes and replacing database_name with the database, user_name with any name you care to put in, and password with an password you care to use
- Make sure that you've unzipped the package and it is living in the htdocs folder of MAMP.
- Navigate to the dotproject folder on your local host. It will throw an error, but will redirect you to the dotProject installer.
- Click "Start Installation"
- Enter the DB settings that you put into place earlier.
- Click on "install db & write cfg" in the lower right corner of the screen.
- With any luck you will get the following message:
Database successfully setup
Config file written successfully
- Click on "Login and Configure the dotProject System Environment" it is not obvious. Remember the Administrator login has been set to admin with a password of passwd.
- I checked off all options at this point
That is IT for setting up the software. This series will continue with observations on using the package.